


Had We Meant to Keep It

by theoldgods



Category: Les liaisons dangereuses | Dangerous Liaisons - Choderlos de Laclos
Genre: Break-up sex, Chocolate Box Exchange, Chocolate Box Exchange 2018, Cunnilingus, Established Relationship, F/M, Kneeling, Missing Scene, Pre-Canon, Sex on Furniture, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-02-03
Packaged: 2019-03-10 11:31:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13500886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoldgods/pseuds/theoldgods
Summary: "that very same ottoman where you and I once sealed so gallantly, and in like fashion, our eternal rupture"(letter 10, Merteuil to Valmont)"Why talk to me of an eternal rupture? I abjure that vow, uttered in a moment of frenzy: we should not have been worthy of making it, had we meant to keep it"(letter 15, Valmont to Merteuil)Merteuil leads Valmont through the process of accepting their final night together.





	Had We Meant to Keep It

**Author's Note:**

  * For [meianoite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/meianoite/gifts).



> Written for meianoite for Chocolate Box 2018! A very happy Valentine's Day to all.

He entered with his natural hair, bound in a simple queue by a pale blue ribbon that made him almost angelic, so long as she did not look at the stony set of his mouth.

“We needn’t.” He draped himself over the edge of the sofa backing, the ribbon hanging inches from her head. She finished her glass as he placed a hand in her curls, his blunt fingertips heavy against her scalp. “It’s foolishness. Pointless deprivation. I won’t do it.”

“It was your idea, vicomte.”

“And I was half-drunk at the time.” He kissed her neck and she leaned into his lips, a liberty she allowed herself inasmuch as it would be one of the last they should share. “What good is a cruel mistress if she shan’t cut down one’s stupidest notions?”

“If you’d rather we simply part now—“

“Wicked.” His fingers traced her necklace, stopping at the edge of her gown. She sat still beneath his touch, the low murmuring of her heart loud in her ears, until her man came in to announce the meal, forcing Valmont to step away. As she stood he said, nearly regretfully, “It’s no matter. The arguments to part smiling while we still may are sound enough. And you will always be _my_ very best.”

Bitterness spread across the back of her throat, enveloping the base of her tongue. It muted the tastes of the feast, even down to the berries strewn across their cakes. They ate richly, in a comfortable silence, broken by the tinkling of glass and porcelain and the polite murmurings of servants.

“You are thoughtful, madame,” he said eventually, wiping cream from the edge of his mouth as the last course was cleared away. “It becomes you.”

She sipped her wine. “Would that I could say the same.”

He tutted, folding his napkin into squares.

“You fidget so, in your way.”

“And you are all ice, of course.” His grin lasted a heartbeat before melting. “And so we return to our native states in times of struggle. If that is true, I cannot make sense of why you want us to end, when we have always seemed so very natural to me.”

Her laughter burst from her before she could think elsewise. “We are the least natural beings known to any decent society, and a number of foul ones besides.”

His eyes were undimmed by any hint of softness and thus rendered all the more touching, in their way. His lazily possessive stare had heated her blood before, but now there was an edge of uncertainty that reminded her of nothing so much as their first coupling, back against a garden wall with his fingers deep inside her.

She’d left him then, hard within his breeches and panting against her, and would of course do so again, as many times as it took to maintain herself.

“You don’t want some wholesome, natural rut, Valmont.” His eyelids fluttered at the sound of his own name, and she stifled a smile. “You want my most unnatural cruelty.”

“Cruelty from my marquise is never unnatural.” He stood and met her gaze. She did not blink. “It’s why we make such good partners.”

She led him back through her rooms, listening to the pace of his tread across carpet and wood, the steady whispering pulse of each step. Her own heart was thudding behind her ribs as he reached for her bedchamber door.

“No.”

He raised one eyebrow. “I do not plan to end this with coyness, Merteuil.”

He used her husband’s name so very rarely in their couplings, loath as he was to be reminded that she was not and never had been entirely his, though he was so unaware of his own possessiveness on this point. His face was flushed red, with drink or lust it mattered not, and she felt her loins tighten as he watched her.

“You did not come for romance, either.” She remained in the boudoir and waited for him to relent, shutting the door behind them with a click that resonated into her abdomen. As he ran one palm across the top of her arse, she watched the shadows flickering across the far wall. “Promise me.”

He exhaled, tightening his grip around her waist and pressing his lips to her hairline. He faltered as her hand slid between his legs.

“Promise me.”

Her voice was tight in her chest, emerging detestably choked. She ran her fingers down his length, quivering within her grasp, as she cleared her throat.

“Once more, and then never again.” His voice was gravel, with the dull undertones of a memorized lesson, rattled off to please a schoolmaster. His hands moved briskly, catching in the drapes of her gown. “Two cardsharps cannot play at the same table.”

She settled onto the ottoman, her skirts fanning around her in a pool of blue. He stood with a hank of hair hanging free to frame his face, eyes wide, his breeches tented.

“We are better apart, vicomte,” she murmured as he approached, lowering himself to one knee. “Together we only distract one another. This will be a far more effective way to proselytize.”

“Divide and conquer.” His voice was soft. One of his hands lifted the hem of her skirts as the other traced a shivery pattern around her wrist. “If I no longer please you—”

“You whine like a schoolboy.” She gathered the masses of fabric up to her waist, baring herself. “If I wanted to be taken by a naïf I would have my pick at some operahouse and would not waste time on your wounded pride, or whatever nonsense this is.”

“What _does_ madame want, on her purgatorial ottoman?”

She leaned back to stare up at the richly ornamented ceiling. He massaged the skin around the top of her stockings until she tugged at his queue, whereupon he crossed around the ottoman on his knees to bury his mouth between the moon-white mounds of her breasts.

“You.” His voice tickled her skin as he pulled one breast entirely free of her stays and stomacher. “You would deny…” Whatever the rest of his sentence might have been was lost in the tingling of his fingertips around her nipple.

“Will you not let me undo you from this mess?” he whispered eventually, kissing the underside of her chin.

Her cunt was throbbing, and sweat glued her stomach to her chemise. She stroked his cheek as he returned his attention to her breast.

“You do remember the first time you took me.”

His smile sent a shiver up her spine. “With my fingers lost inside your cunt?”

“It was too filthy for you to go to your knees, I think.”

He stroked downward, a slow passing of skin against silk until he reached the heat of her opening. She leaned up into his touch. “You have no respect for breeches.”

One of Valmont’s virtues as a lover was his disdain for conversation once the event had begun in earnest, and he went quiet as the base of his hand covered the coarse hair across her mound, sliding a finger inside. She sighed as her muscles pulled him further in.

He stroked for some minutes, until her sighs and muted groans began to flag. Blissfully silent still, he responded to her palm against his forehead by returning to his place between her legs. The look he shot her, eyes blazing behind strands of dark hair, mouth smug, had her laughing silently as he leaned in.

His lips were cool against her, his tongue darting across her nub before settling nearer her entrance. She arranged her legs over his shoulders as he settled his weight back onto his haunches and, a lion momentarily tamed, kissed the inside of her thigh.

“You know where you belong.”

“Madame.”

Valmont’s cock was short if acceptably wide, his fingers so often overeager, his eyes too calculated to give any woman with an ounce of self-respect anything more than a fleeting pleasure. He talked his way into beds and earned his stay with those same lips, and she was determined that this, their last encounter, should go where their first had been unable.

He ate her viciously to a stifled sharp climax, and as she panted, turning her head while her earrings whispered against the ottoman, he offered a softer kiss, his nose brushing her aching nub.

“Slowly.”

Her voice croaked as he repositioned the weight of her legs across his back. He traced a circle around the inside of her thigh, kissing her curls, the edge of her entrance, while she sighed and settled back into her skin. Her mind tumbled in slow circles in time with his lips, a deep rolling pleasure that fluttered just ahead of her consciousness, leading her on for the long minutes of his renewed attention. When she burst again, with his finger stroking her nub while he tongued her entrance, it was into a white bliss that pinned her to the ottoman.

She came to full attention in time to watch him strip himself naked from the waist down, his cock deepest red between his pale thighs, his hair mussed against the back of his jacket. She played with the limp ribbon, feeling the trembling across his shoulders as his hands cradled her hips. When he did not move, she cupped one arse cheek, her fingers splaying across damp skin.

“Take your last rites, monsieur.”

His lips twisted as he guided himself into her.

He moved with short jerking strokes that nonetheless threatened to unseat her from the ottoman. She held him to her, fingers digging into the meat of his arse, and focused her attention on his scarlet face, the taut line of his damp mouth, and his wide hard eyes fixated on the rise and fall of her half-unbound breasts. As the pressure within him rose, ragged words spilled forth.

“I cannot promise.” He tossed his head, brushing hair from his eyes with a jerky hand. “I can only do. Win.”

Still wrapped in her own hazy pleasure, she smiled, though he did not look away from her bosom to see it. When he released, gasping, and fell back down against her, she twisted the fingers of one hand into his hair, sliding the ribbon to the floor. His ear was pungent with sweat as she pressed her mouth against it.

“And yet in our mission, I will, as you said, always be the very best.”

He shuddered and buried his face against her heart.


End file.
